Intentional action and the frame-of-mind argument: new experimental challenges to Hindriks

Abstract

Based on a puzzling pattern in our judgments about intentional action, Knobe (2003) has claimed that these judgments are shaped by our moral judgments and evaluations. However, this claim goes directly against a key conceptual intuition about intentional action -the 'frame-of-mind condition', according to which judgments about intentional action are about the agent's frameof-mind and not about the moral value of his action. To preserve this intuition, Hindriks (2008Hindriks ( , 2014 has proposed an alternate account of the Knobe Effect. According to his 'Normative Reason account of Intentional Action' (NoRIA), a side-effect counts as intentional only when the agent thought it constituted a normative reason not to act but did not care. In this paper, I put Hindriks' account to test through two new studies, the results of which suggest that Hindriks' account should be rejected. However, I argue that the key conceptual insight behind Hindriks' account can still be saved and integrated in future accounts of Knobe's results. Harm Case -The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, "We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment." The chairman of the board answered, "I don't care at all about harming the environment.I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start the new program." They started the new program.Sure enough, the environment was harmed.Did the chairman intentionally harm the environment?In this case, Knobe found that 82% of the people he surveyed judged that the chairman intentionally harmed the environment. Now, consider the following, very similar case:Help Case -The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, "We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, and it will also help the environment." The chairman of the board answered, "I don't care at all about helping the environment.I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start the new program." They started the new program.Sure enough, the environment was helped.Did the chairman intentionally help the environment?In this case, only 23% of participants judged that the chairman intentionally helped the environment.This surprising asymmetry, which people have come to call the 'Knobe Effect' 1 , seems to directly contradict a common presupposition about the folk concept of intentional action: that this concept serves a purely descriptive function within folk psychology, and only describes a particular relation between 3 an agent's mental states and his action. Indeed, in both the Help and Harm cases, the chairman's mental states seem identical: in both cases, he knowingly brings about an outcome he did not specifically intend to cause and does not care about. Thus, it seems that the difference between the two cases cannot be explained by a mere difference in the chairman's mental states. Rather, it seems that what makes a difference is a moral (or, more broadly, an evaluative) factor:...

Can the Knobe Effect Be Explained Away? Methodological Controversies in the Study of the Relationship Between Intentionality and Morality

“…Reasons Against: According to Frank Hindriks (2008, 2014), a side-effect is judged intentional when the agent carelessly brings about an outcome she thought counted as a reason not to act (see Cova, 2016c, for a discussion).…”

Valence of agents and recipients moderates the side-effect effect: two within-subjects, multi-item conceptual replications

“…This would provide evidence in addition to that from studies which have examined different types of intentionality and attitudinal questions and the presence/absence of the accountability question (e.g. Cova, 2017;Cova et al, 2016;Knobe, 2003b) and how participants understand and interpret them (Laurent, Reich, & Skorinko, 2021).…”